Everybody is familiar with the caricature of the fundamentalist preacher or rigid authoritarian priest who, possessing special knowledge his tribe trembles at, pops off about things he doesn’t understand.
He turns up in popular entertainment all the time, denouncing people as witches for building some gadget (a popular theme in time-travel stories), confidently murdering Copernicus (if you are a Dan Brown sucker) or thumping a Bible and howling about fake moon landings. The Ignorant Religious Popinjay so beloved by the manufacturers of our pop-culture dramas and comedies about Science vs. Religion is always treated like The Authority on Everything by gullible doofuses who follow him because they think that his mastery of the one class of information they value makes him a master of all classes of information they know nothing about.
That’s the agitprop continually pounded into our heads by modernity: The Middle Ages (we are told) was that time when those who were masters of mystic hoodoo about the faith were likewise anointed masters of science and enabled to hold back progress for centuries with their ignorant anti-science prattle until our Age of Reason dawned. It’s a beloved and venerable lie, rebutted again and again by real historians of science such as the late Father Stanley Jaki. But it remains a lie believed by millions at this hour.
The irony, of course, is that if any age should be called the Age of Unreason, it’s ours. It proceeds precisely by taking people who know a lot about one thing and anointing them masters of everything. It is further complicated by the fact that many of our contemporaries worship their intellects rather than use them. They “know” what they “know” because they uncritically regurgitate something some “expert” on television said was “the assured results of science.”
Case in point: the adulation and respect still being accorded the increasingly weird and ignorant remarks of physicist Stephen Hawking. Here he is, delivering the verdict from Mount Sinai that God did not create the universe:
“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.”
Classic. There is a law of gravity. It’s just there. Therefore this is no legislator. Like he knows. He is a guy in a lab coat — a technician who knows a great deal about how the lights in the metaphysics classroom work. That doesn’t qualify him to tromp into the metaphysics class and bawl, “I don’t see the point of this junk.” And yet, that’s just what he’s doing, to the awed applause of suckers who, while denouncing the Old Man in Rome as an authoritarian ignoramus, will simultaneously declare, “Hawking said it. I believe it. That settles it.”
The amazing thing is that Hawking seems to be entirely innocent of elementary philosophy here. St. Thomas points out that there are only two decent arguments against the existence of God. The most popular is the Problem of Evil. The other is the one Hawking is trotting out here as new: that things seem to work fine without God. The fallacy is simple: Why are there any things at all? Appealing to some self-existent “law of gravity” suggests that a rather important step in reason has been ignored, such as, oh, why is there a law of gravity in the first place?
Hawking, of course, is free to make metaphysical boners like this all he wants. Similarly, my plumber is free to hold forth on his theories about how the Earth is hollow. But I see no reason in the world to think why either of them should be regarded as having any competence outside their narrow fields.
Mark Shea is content editor of
CatholicExchange.com.
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I think it was Sartre who put the matter most succinctly when he suggested that the most basic philosophical question is: “Why is there something rather than nothing?”. This embarrassing statement from Hawking reminds us that whenever a respected authority offers a opinion about something outside the boundaries of his/her area of expertise, PhD might as well mean “Post hole Digger.”
This reminds me of my brother-in-law, a very intelligent, well respected stem-cell researcher. I love him dearly, he is kind, but oh so gullible in so many ways. Most glaring to me: his involvement in the co-dependency movement. Not the alcoholic co-dependency thing, but the one which maintains no one can abuse you without your permission—all behavior is neutral, it’s only our reactions to said behavior that counts. He asked me to look into it. I looked into it. I said, “Sooo, my abusive ex-husband and the co-dependency people agree: it WAS all my fault; I’m weak, over-sensitive and too engaged with people (all those ridiculous Catholic virtues). And this is helpful how?” “Well, you have to understand, we are all acting out of needs which were created in childhood…” “He needed blood. He was a human vampire feeding on my soul!” What really bothered me was the complete inability to acknowledge the existence of evil. I guess evil as an actual entity doesn’t sit well with scientific minds. A dangerous blindspot! In my experience, what’s more helpful to anyone trying to extricate themselves from the morally challenged is education about abusers (they exist, they are bad) and the tactics of manipulation (they will trick you like Satan). Those alleged “co-dependent” behaviors are often coping strategies. The proof is in the pudding: I’ve been enjoying healthy relationships with healthier people (and not compromising my tender qualities) and the poor Ph.D is stuck with my narcissistic sister, his 5th marriage.
http://m-francis.livejournal.com/168500.html
“The irony, of course, is that if any age should be called the Age of Unreason, it’s ours.”
One year at the Walk for Life in San Francisco, a local angrily hissed at us. “Go back to the Dark Ages where you belong.”
And I thought—like the comment above—if any age is a Dark Age it is our own…abortion, genocide, etc.
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